


what comes after nightmares

by moth_writes



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: AFTG Big Bang 2020, Angst, Embedded Images, Fluff, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Nightmares, Very detailed descriptions of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-09-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:48:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26614747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moth_writes/pseuds/moth_writes
Summary: Father won't accept anything less than the best.Nathaniel shuts his eyes and wills himself to a dreamless sleep. Or at least one without knives and blood and pain.He's not successful, but the next time he wakes it is to an alarm and the sun in his window.It's the best he can hope for....Neil falls asleep easily, and he knows he has someone with him to battle the darkness back where it belongs now.Neil is thirty, and he is wrapped in his husband’s arms with two cats purring next to them.He fights his own nightmares, and he has his family at his side to help.He’s home.(Neil's nightmares and what happens after, ages 5-30.)
Relationships: Neil Josten & The Foxes (All For The Game), Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard, Other Mentioned/Implied Relationships - Relationship
Comments: 4
Kudos: 119
Collections: AFTG Big Bang 2020





	what comes after nightmares

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!!
> 
> This is my first [AFTG Big Bang](https://aftgbigbang.tumblr.com/), and the artist for this fic was [i-did](i-did.tumblr.com), who drew the amazing art at the end! 
> 
> Beta'd by [helplesshobo](helplesshobo.tumblr.com) on Tumblr.
> 
> (Also, quick note timeline-wise; Neil is sixteen in the bit after Mary dies because I attempted to do some math and came up with: Neil is eighteen when the books start, a year before he was seventeen, and I put the scene just before his birthday. Anything else...just don't think about it too much)

_Nathaniel, age 5_

Nathaniel doesn’t like school.

He’s only been going for two days, but those two days have made him feel more alone than he ever has.

He’s not allowed friends. Not real ones. 

Nathan will only let him play with his circles’ kids, and only in public. To make an impression-can’t have anything out of place, after all, and a friendless child is suspicious.

But Nathaniel wants. So he tries something new, something he’s never dared.

He talks to kids on his own. He shares his markers-brand new and top-of-the-line, of course-with the boy who sits next to him. They smile, and Nathaniel thinks that _maybe_ , this might last.

They sit together at lunch, play together at recess, partner up in class.

It’s nice. Nathaniel isn’t as lonely anymore, though he knows he can’t tell the boy anything true.

It lasts three weeks. 

Then Nathan finds out, and everything ends.

Nathaniel is called to the basement after school. He isn’t allowed there on his own, and the stench of iron-heavy blood is the first thing that he notices. It smells fresh.

It _is_ fresh.

The boy’s father, the one who picked him up from school everyday, is laying bloody on the floor. There are cuts across his face, chest, arms. Nathaniel looks at his father so he doesn’t have to see.

_This is your fault,_ Nathan whispers, grinning, while he drags his cleaver slowly across the man’s stomach. _You disobeyed. I told you no friends, junior-did you really think you could fool me?_

Nathaniel doesn’t watch, but he knows already what he would see. 

(He is familiar with internal organs pulled inside out. He knows too much about anatomy for a child so young, is too familiar with sights most never see. He has held hearts and lungs and slick ropes of intestine still warm in his hands with their body dying on the floor and their blood soaked into his deliberately red shoes.)

Nathaniel shakes his head and doesn’t look. The man dies on the floor of his basement, and all Nathaniel can think is he can’t face the boy, his no-longer and not-really friend. 

Mary tells him later that night he’s switching schools. A private school, for Baltimore’s elite, and he better learn how to obey because Nathan has spies everywhere, sees everything.

Nathaniel resolves to be good, if only for her. If only so all no one else dies because of him.

He doesn’t promise it. Nathaniel has been taught not to make promises he can’t keep.

  
  


_Nathaniel, age 6_

It is Nathaniel’s sixth birthday and there is a package for him in his mother’s hands.

It is wrapped in yellow and blue and a tag on the side says his name. It’s from one of his father’s associates, the one with a daughter far younger than Nathaniel and a son far older.

Nathaniel will be allowed to keep this one. Every other present he gets is whisked away that night, so he isn’t spoiled, but since the associate comes over often he will get to keep it for himself. For appearances sake, yes, but it will be the first non-necessary thing that he can actually play with. He isn’t allowed to touch the toys in his room unless someone comes over-unless the children of his father’s associates come over.

The party itself is as extravagant as Nathan’s always are. Nathaniel puts on a smile when it is expected, and he shakes hands and blows out candles and poses for a picture when he is told to. His mother’s cold hand guides him through it, resting heavily on the back of his neck.

There will be small red marks there tonight, Nathaniel knows, from her nails digging in when he slips up. When his words trip and the fake polite smile doesn’t come quick enough.

He wishes he could be good, but he keeps messing up no matter how hard he tries.

Then comes the part of the night he _hates_. Nathaniel sits at the head of the table, an elaborate decorated cake in front of him and candles flickering atop it.

He waits for them to finish singing, staring at the cake. He doesn’t ever know what to do, who to look at, and being the center of attention makes him uncomfortable.

He doesn’t think about that, doesn’t look at them staring at him. He thinks, instead, of the game Nathan had put on earlier. He hadn’t let Nathaniel watch with him, of course, but he’d seen a bit while he was passing through. 

Exy. The name stuck in his mind, something new and shiny and better than schoolwork and sliced pig carcasses.

But now Neil had to focus, had to concentrate on looking happy and excited and saying thank you, opening presents he couldn’t keep.

It’s all generic, six-year-old boy things. Toy trucks, a baseball glove, a package of colorful cards to some game he didn’t care to know. He didn’t care about any of it, really. His life was school and knives; it hurt less when toys and comforts and childish games disappeared that way.

The yellow and blue package is set before him. It is the one he can keep, the one he will have, and Nathaniel unwraps it carefully.

The uncovered box is long and thin and held shut with clear tape. His mother slices through it with the cake knife, and Nathaniel pries it open.

It is a plastic sword about as long as his arm from shoulder to fingertip. Nathaniel’s stomach turns seeing it, but he makes himself look excited, forces his mouth to open and his voice to work as he thanks the man.

Blades and cleavers and all things sharp fill his life, his dreams, and as much as he would deny it, he is his father’s copy. This is what runs through his veins.

So Nathaniel grins and bears it until it’s late enough for him to be dismissed.

…

He is watching his father and Lola and Romeo, and they are in the basement.

Nathaniel isn’t allowed in the basement unless he’s brought there. And he’s only ever gone for lessons.

Not like his school lessons. Lessons like life or death, like throwing knives and cutting into warm skin and bandaging someone who will die with his mother standing over him.

He doesn’t mind the knife throwing. It’s the least involved of all of it, and as long as Romero puts out a real target and not one of his father’s unfortunate victims, it even borders on enjoyable.

He _hates_ the first aid, hates feeling life slip away under his hands, hates having his mother’s hissing voice in his ear. Sometimes that whisper follows him through the day, haunts him at night, a chorus of _shoddy bandaging, Abram_ and _those stitches are too loose, boy_.

His toy sword is in his father’s hands, and he twirls it just as competently as a knife or his favored cleaver. Light glints off of it in a way Nathaniel recognizes.

This is metal sharpened, not the dull plastic of a cheap toy.

It cuts through air like water, slow and heavy and all too real. Nathaniel watches his father throw it up, catch it, again and again with a steady _thwack_ each time. Beside him, Lola has her favored razor-edged daggers, and Romero’s throwing knives are strapped and shining neatly at his hips.

Then Nathan starts hacking at thin air, swinging again and again and each time hitting something that screams.

Then Nathan swings again, one final time, and Mary’s bloody head lands at Nathaniel’s feet.

It rolls, all of it, eyes rolling in bloody-cut sockets, head rolling is small back-and-forths, hair laying like a carpet gone mouldered.

Nathaniel gags, and reaches, and his fingers touch smooth, cooling flesh. And then there is a thump, and he looks up just in time to see the rest of her broken body. 

It lands heavily and blood pools around it, around them, filling the room and turning the air metal-rust soaked in a much too familiar way. Her neck ends in a ragged stump, skin torn and hacked. Nathaniel can see just the smallest bit of white buried in the red, and he almost throws up.

Nathaniel stumbles backwards, hitting a cold wall oozing, and opens his eyes again as his father starts forward and knives fall clanging around him.

He wakes in his bedroom with the start of a winter sunrise lighting gold and orange on his ceiling.

Nathaniel almost squeezes his eyes shut again, but he doesn't want to do anything that might trigger memories dreamt or real. 

Instead, he slips out of bed and only shivers a bit when his feet touch the too-cold floor. He hops his way to the dresser anyway-he doesn’t mind the cold, but he doesn’t like it, either-and reaches up. He’s too short to reach the back, but that’s fine. He brings the stepstool he uses to get into bed over and with that, he can reach the sword easily.

When his fingers land on it, he lets a relieved breath slip free. It’s still dull plastic, room temperature and rounded edges. The cold, thin metal from his dream-his nightmare-is gone.

He can’t go check on Mary. She shares a room with Nathan, shares a bed, and it would be impossible to even open the door without alerting both.

Impossible to even _get_ there unnoticed. The guest room Lola and Malcolm use is right next door, and they would hear Nathaniel’s purposely creaky door open.

And it’s locked. Mary tells him it’s for his protection. Nathan tells him he has a bathroom attached to his room and no reason to ever need to wander around the house in the hours of dark.

Nathaniel ticks the reasons off in his mind and then puts them out. He doesn’t need to think about what he can’t do, or why.

Mary is safe. He’s dreamed of her death many times and she’s always been well and as healthy as she can be when he wakes. Healthy as she can be with bags under her eyes and thin cuts on her sides and bruises dark around her wrists.

So Nathaniel hides the sword carefully away in his closet, and drags the stepstool back where it belongs, and goes to start his morning routine as well as he can locked in. 

It’s only an hour before he’s supposed to be awake, he sees, and he decides to start his schoolwork early. He has a spelling test soon, and he can’t always remember the way the vowels go in _neighbor_ and whether _gray_ is spelled with an a or an e.

Nathaniel is six years old and he is sitting at his desk in a locked room. He is dressed and messy-haired and clutching a pencil in one small hand as he carefully prints his spelling words over and over. 

He is, most of all, trying to not to think about swishing blades and rolling eyes and drowning, dying, in a dark room with red hair and ice eyes glinting, with brown hair turned red and brown eyes unseeing.

  
  


_Nathaniel, age 8_

Nathaniel tries to be good.

When Lola tells him to hold still, it'll only be a little cut, when his father tells him to sit still at the dinner table, when his mother explains, again, that it's best to do what Father says and just listen. Be obedient.

Nathaniel has to be the best he can.

He tries. But he always ends up failing.

Mother sleeps in her room with Father, so Nathaniel can't go to her when claws and knives tear his dreams to shreds.

(He remembers trying, once, to crawl in beside his mother. Her and the edge of the bed-he knew not to disturb Father. Mother had woken immediately and ushered him back to bed, scolding him as they went. He hasn't tried again.)

Nathaniel, now, lies in bed and stares at the ceiling. He has school tomorrow, his first day of second grade, and he knows he had to be rested.

Father won't accept anything less than the best.

Nathaniel shuts his eyes and wills himself to a dreamless sleep. Or at least one without knives and blood and pain.

He's not successful, but the next time he wakes it is to an alarm and the sun in his window.

It's the best he can hope for. 

  
  


_Nathaniel, age 10_

Nathaniel wakes with the sound of racquets ringing through his head.

He'd dreamed they had crashed down on him, his face, chest, hands, until he'd been a bloody mess under Riko's too-wide smile and Kevin feigned ignorance.

He is intact. Nathaniel is familiar with the sensation of dripping blood, and this is not it.

This is the lonely dread of nightmares without comfort. Nathaniel lies back down. He is used to it, used to bearing nights of terror alone.

It is what he always does, and it is what he will always do.

  
  


_Chris, age 12_

Nathaniel doesn’t like running.

He’s not Nathaniel anymore, though. He hadn’t been allowed to take even his name with him when they left. When they fled.

His name is Chris and he is nobody. But the dreams, the nightmare, still follow.

He sleeps next to his mom in dingy hotel room beds. _Alice_ wants him close. (Mary doesn’t exist anymore. He has to keep reminding himself.)

Chris doesn’t scream when he is thrown from nightmares. Nathaniel wasn’t stupid enough to keep that habit, and. Though he tries to, Chris is still Nathaniel, deep inside where his mother can’t see. He puts that thought out of his mind and focuses, instead, on being who he is supposed to, who his mother wants him to be. 

But Chris trembles, shakes, cries. He’s too strung out with stress and worry and hunger to not. 

Alice wakes with him, and her thin, cold arms wrap around him until he can’t move. It’s not comfort; it’s practicality. Can’t have a crying child, can’t bring attention to questions they can’t answer. He cries himself back to sleep in her steel arms and can’t help but think it’s more than he’s got before, more comfort than he was ever allowed in Baltimore.

  
  


_Alex, age 13_

Alex is thirteen, and he hasn't been Nathaniel in three years. 

He doesn’t miss it, not anymore. He thinks of it like one of those pictures, the ones where you have to step back to see more than jumbled ink. He just had to get far enough away to see how awful being Nathaniel was.

He left the small remnants that remained in Canada, buried with the man that shot his mother. Not fatally. Alex wouldn’t be here, otherwise. Not alive.

He sleeps in his bullet-proof vest. His mother keeps him in arms’ reach.

Alex thinks what she does now is more obligation, more for her and her protection. Her investment, rather than her son.

He has to be a good investment to be kept, though. So Alex pushes down any hint of disobedience and learns how to care for a bullet wound, and how to care for a broken leg, as their cover demands. He makes the fake name, fake life his mother tells him his own and slips into it as thoroughly as possible.

He doesn’t feel like Nathaniel. Nathaniel never killed, only watched.

Nathaniel’s life haunts Alex when he sleeps. The feel of flesh parting under his knife, of blood dripping down his wrists, a hot iron striking his shoulder white-cold, shrill laughter ringing. 

Alex takes to not sleeping for as long as he can. His mother, cloaked under a new name, new face, pretends concern when he faints at school.

His mother passes off his fainting spell as too many nights spent studying late. She’s not wrong-Alex needs something to do when he lies in his mother’s cold arms, and going over the day’s work in his mind was productive. More productive than staring at the ceiling and willing his eyes to stay open.

That night, his mother hands him a glass of water and makes him drink it all. Alex registers the slightly off taste, sees the residue left on the sides, and knows she’s drugged him. 

He doesn't mind. His mother is only trying to protect him, after all.

  
  


_Stefan, age 15_

He is fifteen when exy starts creeping into his dreams.

They have, as much as one can, settled into being on the run. Five years, now, and Mary-Erika-is no less strict than she was, but. But now, Stefan sees racquets carried through hallways, sees posters and banners celebrating the school exy team, sees the easy way the strikers run and goalies deflect and the smooth passes across court and he wants.

He _wants_.

Stefan spends what little free time he has watching old exy games, as many as he can get his hands on. His mother is suspicious, but to the outside eye it’s normal for a boy to have an interest in sports and Stefan needs information to keep that front.

And it’s a good way to perfect his German, he says, when she corners him after he’s spent a full two days watching everything he can find, including news clips and interviews. She accepts his excuse, but she’s watching him. He stops devouring everything he can and settles for watching the weekly televised game only.

(He ignores his first dream about exy. He was ten, and he’d just played and come home to violence. Exy is something he doesn’t want to associate with blood and pain and Nathaniel, so he puts that dream of racquets crashing bloody out of his mind and never thinks of it.) 

Stefan dreams of exy for the second first time, and it is wonderful.

It is burning air in burning lungs and solid weight in his hands and all the time in the world to play and play and never stop.

Stefan dreams the same for almost a week. He’s just starting to expect it, to long for the hours he plays at night and the brief escape it gives him when. When.

He dreams of broken racquets and broken bones and a life cut short early. He doesn’t remember the details, and he thanks everything he can for it. He doesn’t need this spoiled too.

Except the dream happens again, and again, and again, each time just a little bit different. Blood and knives and broken hope, and Stefan puts it out of his mind determinedly each morning.

He throws himself into exy more than before. When his mother’s carefully disguised file folder is too small to hold everything, he suggests they make a binder this time-something innocuous for a schoolboy. Exy, another common obsession. She agrees, and they spend two days putting it in order, his mother quizzing him on pieces from time to time.

Then they leave Germany, and Jonathan and Martha land in Austria.

  
  


_Abram, age 16_

Abram doesn’t sleep the night Mary dies. 

She would be furious, hearing him call her Mary. Hearing him calling himself Abram.

But she’s dead, and Abram thinks maybe she missed being Mary. Mary had a family, a _life,_ before Nathan got to her. Before Abram was born, before her life was no longer hers.

It hadn’t been a long one. She’d only been sixteen when Abram was born. Abram mourns her lost life, the one she could have had without him, without Nathan.

She’d only had her own life, free of him, of Nathan, for sixteen years.

Abram is sixteen, and he is the opposite. He’s never lived a day freely.

He’s stalling.

He doesn’t want to see her too-pale face, her burning body. Doesn’t want to hear her voice, strung with pain and fear.

But no one can last without sleep, and Abram needs to stay sharp.

He catches minutes, hours, here and there. He dozes with promises and names and plans and nameless, total fear in his head. His hands shake. He doesn’t cry.

It’s midwinter-almost Nathaniel’s birthday-and the beach is too cold. Abram clings to the sound of the waves, lapping steadily and almost comfortingly against the near-frozen sand.

He is almost seventeen, and his mother is dead.

Abram can’t count how many times he startles awake in the California winter-cold night air. He’d stumbled down the beach and collapsed when he couldn’t walk anymore, and he forgets, when he wakes with the memory of smoke in his eyes and heat on his fingertips. 

His mother isn’t there to press thin arms to his chest, to hold him still and quiet until he calms and falls. Isn’t there to anchor him to their goal, to their plan. 

He has no one and nothing. Abram doesn’t exist anymore, and who he will be doesn’t exist yet, and so he is nameless and alone and in pain.

He feels like a child again, left to deal with things that drip and claw through his mind alone.

  
  


_Neil, age 18_

Neil is still new and as much as he tries, there is blood under his nails that he can’t scrub away.

Nathaniel, Abram-their pasts were smoke and blood and glinting metal, the flash of knives in gun fights and the crack of guns in knife fights. Neil is someone new, someone clean, someone with loving-but-distant parents and a house designed for comfort.

Neil is everything he is and nothing he will ever be. 

Neil puts thoughts of all the lies he’s lived out of his mind and makes himself as comfortable as he can. What he has now is a sleeping bag on the ground in a supposed-to-be-empty house and the measly contents of his duffel. He has to focus on that, on being safe and staying alive and unnoticed.

Neil is not Nathaniel, but he is still Abram when night falls and there is no one to see his slip. And Abram lost his mother on a cold beach only a few months ago. 

And it haunts him like nothing has before.

His lies stay in the place they were built everytime they slipped on new skins, but this is not a lie. He, in any incarnation, has never been good with the truth.

But now it weighs heavy on his shoulders and it is slime in his ears and terror in his throat. He dreams the same as he has for months, of burning and blackened flesh on too exposed bone.

When Neil wakes, it is not gentle. He doesn’t move, exactly, but his head is ringing and his heart is ringing and he is shaking under his thin cover, gasping into the cold night air.

He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them when it only brings paranoid fear. Neil is not safe here, alone in a small town with grief making his steps heavy. But this is all he has, and so this is what he calls home.

  
  


~~_Neil_~~ _Nathaniel, age_ ~~_18_~~ _19_

Neil’s first year at Palmetto State University feels like a dream with the aftertaste of a nightmare.

It is orange and white and blood. It is red and green decorations draped over too-still, too-dark halls. It is Christmas, and he is at the Nest, and he is bleeding and numb.

Neil never celebrated Christmas before the Nest. His mother was Jewish and his father didn’t care. He had let Mary celebrate her holidays, continue the religion she’d been raised with, for appearance’s sake. He’d not let her pass it to Nathaniel, so she’d passed it to Alex, and Chris, and Jonathan, instead.

She never got the chance to pass her faith to Neil. He wished she had, wished he had traditions to bind his mind to and something to believe in.

But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t disrespect her memory. And then he is at the nest.

And there are no holidays at the Nest.

Only dark.

Most of the time Nathaniel is asleep, it is dreamless. Because he is exhausted, pushed too far past his limits. (He can’t be Neil here, Can’t taint the happy warmth of Neil and the Foxes, can’t let the cold and dark of the Nest seep into and poison it.)

Two days before Christmas-Nest days, not real ones-he dreams.

Nightmare. What’s the difference, really? Happiness? He hasn’t had enough in his life to say he knows the difference. Know what it really is.

_Fox._

His dream feels like familiar, bloody nightmares, with cleavers and burning cars and the unmistakable loneliness that comes with knowing you have no one else in the world.

_Fox._

It is the same, but with new edges. Edges like knives, like Riko’s voice laughing and taunting. Black instead of orange and blood in place of white.

In the blood scape of the nightmare, Riko is standing above him. Nathaniel is on the ground, trembling with exhaustion. The crowd around them carries the faces of his past lives, and of the ones he’s taken. Blood and scars drip down all of them in graphic detail and horrifying accuracy.

Nathaniel watches Riko’s face, twisted, blinding, sadistic smile. It warps as he laughs, as he brings the racquet down slowly, so slowly. 

It cuts through the air, and Nathaniel can’t move. It cuts through the air, and Nathaniel watches, pinned in place. His chest is bleeding. His head is bleeding. It slips down his face.

The racquet crashing down on his hand, his arm, fracturing and breaking it beyond measure and reason. Nathaniel feels blood slip warmly down his face, his arms, staining white bandages rusted red.

His legs, next. Riko breaks his ankle as Nathaniel lurches awake, gasping in the too-cold air of the nest.

Jean is not in the room. Nathaniel, despite reason, checks his arms and legs before he lays back down.

He rolls to face the wall. It’s a risk, but he can’t stand to see the black and red he hates in place of the orange and white he loves.

Nathaniel doesn’t let the tears burning in his eyes slip. He’s lost everything, but this he can control.

So he stares at the wall, and holds his burning eyes open, and wishes he was with his family.

_Raven._

Fox.

  
  


_Neil, Age 19_

Neil is with the Foxes and it doesn’t feel like a dream.

It’s good, because Neil’s dreams have always been wrapped up in nightmares. This time, with the Foxes, has tainted edges but it doesn’t travel further. 

Most times. He can keep it all separate, most times. But now, with Andrew still gone and Kevin training him harder than ever, Neil’s nerves are shot and he’s twitching with every unexpected sound.

He hopes Riko kept his promise. Hopes Andrew is safe in Easthaven.

Hopes, when he lays down at night, that he doesn’t dream.

And he doesn’t. Most times. 

The night before they pick up Andrew Neil has a nightmare. When he looks back, it’s a miracle it took until then. A miracle or Kevin, anyway.

He’s in a hospital room. It’s stark, and sterile, and almost empty.

Andrew is tied to a chair in the center of the room. Kevin’s lifeless body lays just to the right, bloodied hands, bloodied hair, dripping into a slowly growing puddle.

Neil’s father and Riko stand side by side behind Andrew. Andrew, who is tied to a chair, who is dripping blood from scars that mimic Neil’s, from empty eye sockets when he raises his head and grins that manic-bright smile.

Neil watches blood stain the torn remnants of Andrew’s shirt. If he looks, he can see it seeping from a rough patch on his side, from a bullet hole in his shoulder, from thin cuts lining his stomach. Neil resists the urge to touch the matching spots on himself.

It’s all he can do. He can’t move, can’t run, not with his protection not-staring at him and Kevin Day crumpled and broken.

Neil’s heart is in his throat and his stomach in his shoes. He can’t meet their eyes. Not Andrew, who has none, but Nathan. Riko. _Kevin._

There is no door, no exit to this horrible scene. All Neil can do is bear it, try to find a way to wake up.

Nathan laughs and steps forward. His tie, striped red and black and blood, brushes Andrew’s rust-flecked hair as light glints off the cleaver in his hand. 

Neil flinches.

Riko raises his near-broken racquet, brings it down on Kevin’s near-broken body with a smile and a crack.

Neil’s heart stops, then beats faster. He didn’t think that was possible. His chest splits with it, his breath rattles in lungs turned cold. He can’t feel his fingers.

Nathan brings the cleaver to Andrew’s throat. Kevin screams hoarsely.

Neil feels a tear slip down his face, warmth and salt and no comfort at all.

Nathan slices, and Andrew splits, and Neil-

wakes to Matt standing above him and a barely lit dorm.

Neil thanks him with shaky words, unable to do much more than stutter and tremble. Matt doesn’t touch him, but wraps a blanket around his shoulders and offers hot chocolate and a movie.

It’s two a.m, and Neil and Matt are sitting on the couch, watching a shitty rom-com with steaming cups of hot chocolate. Matt provides a running commentary that distracts Neil far more thoroughly than anything on screen.

Neil thinks, briefly, that this is the best comfort he’s ever gotten after a nightmare. The only real kind, anyway.

  
  


_Neil, age 20_

Neil sleeps soundly, most days. Most days he sleeps facing the room, with Andrew at his back and an arm under his pillow in place of a gun.

Andrew’s presence, on the more-and-more rare days that Neil nightmares, is enough. To drive away the terror. To turn and see his whole, healthy face, unmarred and unmistakably _Andrew_.

But rare days still happen, and this is one of them. Neil doesn’t quite remember the details-he grasps the fleeting edge of cleaverbloodracquet, a familiar echo, but he let it slip away. He remembers enough horrors to last him, to not need this one. 

He doesn’t need any of them, really. But at this point, violence and fear are so deeply ingrained he can’t imagine being rid of it.

Can’t imagine what he would look like, be like, without.

Neil turns to face Andrew. He’s awake, staring at Neil with his not-quite-smile and concern creased in his brow.

Neil wants to reach up and smooth it away. He lifts his hand, meets Andrew’s hazelgold eyes, and does when Andrew nods slightly.

He leaves his hand on the side of Andrew’s face, idly stroking his thumb over the rough of his eyebrow and the softer skin around it.

Andrew pulls Neil closer, lays his arm gently over his waist, curls his other to cradle Neil’s head.

It doesn’t feel restricting. It feels like Andrew is holding the pieces of him together. (His mother, in his mind now, felt like she was breaking him in her smothering efforts to do the opposite. Cold steel burning and a pretense worn too thin.)

Neil kisses Andrew-a familiar enough dance that by now, he can tell consent in the minutiae of Andrew’s expression, in the tightening of his arms around Neil, in the slight tilt of his chin forward.

Neil’s fear disperses completely, replaced with the quiet hum of _home_ and _safe_.

  
  


_Neil, age 21_

Neil hasn’t had a nightmare in almost three months.

It’s a new record. Last time he only made it two months and a week before he woke, trembling and with gore sparking behind his eyes.

But. It’s Neil’s birthday. Neil’s, not Nathaniel's, and he is in Columbia with Andrew after a wonderful day spent with his family.

It is not the kind of day best suited to nightmares. Terrors. Except it is, and it makes sense, in a twisted, bloody sort of way.

Riko is long dead and buried, his father the same. He is safe in his contract with Ichirou.

They can’t hurt him anymore.

Not physically, anyway.

And now Neil is hunched over the sink of Andrew’s bathroom, with the taste of flat soda and cigarette smoke in his mouth and bags under his eyes.

Andrew is in the kitchen. He’d talked Neil out of his nightmare, walked him to the bathroom, and told him to meet him in the kitchen when his head was on right.

Neil laughs, a dry little chuckle, at that thought. Maybe his head was never screwed on right. Maybe the problem was when it was.

Maybe the problem was when he tried to think in metaphor like that. Neil gave up that train and splashed cold water over his face instead.

He blinks it out of his eyes, and with each a horror set filled his mind.

_Blink._ Riko with his racquet. _Crack._

_Blink._ His father standing over Mary’s bloodied corpse, laughing with bloody knives.

_Blink._ Andrew, bleeding from his arms and eyes and mouth, cleaver at his throat.

_Knock._

Neil shakes himself out of the stupor he’d fallen into. Andrew was standing in the doorway-Neil had left it open for him-holding a cup in one hand and a movie case in the other.

Neil blinked. He had told Andrew about how Matt had helped him after his nightmares, of course, but he didn’t think Andrew had taken it to heart.

Steam rose from the cup and clouded Andrew’s glasses as he waited, unblinking and unwavering.

Neil stepped forward. He asked that little question, the three words they had exchanged innumerable times.

_Yes._

Neil looped his arms around Andrew’s shoulders and pressed a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth, careful not to disturb the cup Andrew held between them.

Steam brushed his chin. Hair brushed his fingers. Glasses pressed into his cheek. The distant electricity of a thunderstorm slipped through the cracked-open window with the scent of night air and anticipation.

Neil sighed. _Home._

Neil and Andrew are sitting in the living room of their families’ house in Columbia. It is almost three in the morning, and they are sharing a blanket, watching a documentary and sipping slowly cooling hot chocolate. Rain lashes against windows closed too late, and the sunrise is a distant thought.

Nightmares are a fleeting guest, no longer a permanent resident in Neil’s mind, and he is happy.

  
  


_Neil, age 23_

Neil is not the kind of person that waits when nightmares and terror shadow his eyes and taint every thought.

He is alone, this time, because Andrew stayed overnight at Renee’s. Movies and chocolate and beating the shit out of each other, he said, and Neil saw the rare spark of excitement in his eyes. 

So Andrew went, and Neil stayed, and now he knew he would have a nightmare. Simple.

And then there was Kevin.

Kevin, who was in AA, who wore Exy and blue-purple-pink pride pins on his bags, who argued about everything and wasn’t ashamed to cry because of a movie. Who had his father and his Foxes at his side, who had a queen on his cheek and scars on his hand and had realized he would be okay.

Neil had always seen Kevin’s spine. You don’t grab your abuser’s arm to stop him hurting someone (stop him hurting Neil) if you’re spineless. 

Don’t.

Can’t.

(Neil thinks, deep in his heart in the smothering quiet, he would not have been able to do the same were he in Kevin’s place and Nathan in Riko’s. But that is something he will never have to test, so he does not think about it.)

When Neil goes to bed-at the same time as usual, because why deny the inevitable?-Kevin is sitting on his bed, watching something on his laptop. Neil can’t see from this angle if it’s Exy or history or any of his other fleeting fascinations.

He doesn’t much care.

Neil settles into bed, his routine minus one. Minus Andrew.

The small bed feels too big.

Neil sleeps…

...and dreams.

Blood and light and death and burning, insensible shapes and too solid reality. He is trapped in the car, the once long since gone, a burnt shell on a beach across the country.

He’s trapped in a car long since gone and he’s burning. It feels like Lola’s lighter multiplied, like the crack of racquet and skull, like being alone in the worst way possible.

Except.

He isn’t alone. His mother is there, bloody face pressed against the window. He yells for her to leave, to go, to spare herself this, and. She disappears.

Neil sits back in the seat, resigned to the feeling of flesh melting off of him and fusing so thoroughly to the seat they blend seamlessly. He’d cry, but there is no moisture in him to do it, not when his blood is boiling inside him.

Something touches his arm. A hand, small and blackened, burned to the bone and past.

Neil notices, oddly, that fake nails are melted to exposed nubs of sharp ash-stained bone. A gold ring bends oddly around one finger, and Neil thinks it would fall to pieces if he touched it. He doesn’t try, because.

Because.

His mother is sitting in the seat next to him and she is laughing as they burn and boil and melt.

He can’t scream. He can’t shut his eyes-no eyelids anymore. He can’t do anything but watch for a second time how his mother’s hair burns away and skin slips and bubbles.

She reaches for his shoulder. Neil feels the touch connect, and the hand is larger than it should be, and he jerks away and reaches-

and wakes to Kevin’s worried face.

Neil gasps and flinches. Kevin’s eyes widen and he pulls his hand away.

The light is on, and Neil is home but without.

Kevin asks worried questions and Neil does his best to answer. 

_No_ , leave Andrew. You don’t need to call him.

_No,_ don’t turn the light off.

_No_ , don’t talk about it. Don’t want to remember it.

Kevin asks how he can help. Neil tells him to _talk._

Exy, history, movies, books, the color of the fucking sky, just say _something_ and don’t stop-

So Kevin talks, and Neil listens, and terror fades into dust with the warmth of words and sunrise.

  
  


_Neil, age 25_

He is graduating college when he thought he would never live past twenty. 

He is twenty-five (legally, technically) and he has, in no particular order: a professional contract, a family, an apartment waiting for him, and Andrew.

Andrew. Neil comforts himself with the thought that he is waiting, that though Neil is alone-but-not now, he won’t be soon. Soon.

But soon is not now, and as Neil lays down to sleep he feels terror gather like storm clouds at the edges of his mind.

But he needs to sleep, and he doesn’t have anything in this almost empty dorm to help him ward it off. 

He shares a room with Robin and the sophomores use the dorms interchangeably-there’s no telling who or how many decided to crash on Neil’s sofa instead of in their own beds. 

That thought doesn’t help much. Or at all, really.

Neil gathers his blankets to himself and sleeps.

He is in the dark, cold, and he cannot see. When Neil listens carefully, he can hear the running engine of a car, and he can feel it rumbling under his cheek.

When he tentatively spreads his hands, checking where he is, it is small. Enclosed.

Neil’s breath comes faster. He could never afford to be claustrophobic, not before, not with his mother hiding him away in closets and cupboards and dusty crawlspaces.

And yet.

He is here and his breath is too fast and his heart is too fast and Neil wants to escape, wants to run, wants to _wake-_

His fingers catch on the seam where the trunk closes and he pushes, hard, desperate, and. 

And Neil bursts into consciousness, into waking. He inhales as deeply as he can, willing out and away the stale air and dust of a long repressed memory-turned-dream.

He wishes Andrew was here. But he isn’t, and it’s late, and Neil forgot to charge his phone again.

Instead, there are brown eyes peering worriedly at him from next to his bed.

Oh. Robin must have gotten back sooner that expected. He blinks and her hand withdraws from where it was hovering over his chest, falling to her side.

Neil meets her eyes and nods. Robin sits on the edge of his bed where Neil’s legs had just been, and she is nervous. Neil can feel it in that familiar like-calls-to-like way.

But Neil is not nervous. He is safe here, and he knows there are people willing to burn down cities to find him.

He spent so long on edge, trusting nothing, that the grooves in his mind where comfort and love ran, however thin and feigned, had iced over. 

They are long thawed, now, and Neil is still learning.

He and Robin don’t speak. He sits up in the tiny bed he shared with Andrew for so long, and he pulls out his math book, and he thinks of things that don’t have bloodied edges.

Robin sits next to him, legs crossed, and she reads one of the books Andrew left for her last time he visited Neil.

They don’t speak. They don’t need to. 

Neil looks at Robin, and he wonders if this warmth in his chest and pride in his lungs is what Dan felt when she looked at him those last years.

The sun rises, and Neil and Robin are safe and they are happy and though it is no longer more than Neil thinks he deserves, he is still, in the small, doubting corner in the very back of his mind, surprised.

In a nice way.

In the best way.

  
  


_Neil, age 26_

Neil graduated almost a year ago and it is his last night in his apartment.

He never thought he’d graduate, never believed he’d make it past twenty, and now he has a family at his back and the cats in his arms and he is moving in with the man who kept him safe, who still does. The man who Neil loves, and thinks he always will.

Neil surveys the piles of boxes stacked next to the door. There aren’t many-Neil hasn’t been able to make himself hold on to everything or buy little knicknacks like Matt and Nicky do-but it’s more than Neil’s ever owned before, and it kind of surprises him. He hadn't thought he had so much, but three trips to the hardware store had proven him otherwise.

His phone dings, and Neil knows Matt is waiting with his truck outside. He puts the last box onto the pile, and heads downstairs to let Matt in.

…..

Neil doesn’t sleep in their new apartment that night. It’s a long drive, and since Neil doesn’t have enough stuff for a moving truck, Matt had volunteered to bring him and his things to he and Andrew’s new place. 

Allison had insisted they stay overnight at her house. It would require them to take a small detor, but he and Matt had agreed that was better than their other options.

It was late when they arrived, pulling into Allison’s open garage. The lights in her house were all on, but the surrounding area was completely dark with the exception of some dim streetlights. 

Allison had already opened the door, leaning backlit against the frame. She scooped Neil up in a tight hug as soon as he was in arms reach, and Neil squeezed back gratefully.

He had missed her. It had been months since he had seen most of his family.

When she finally pulls him away, leading them in with a dramatic flourish, her house isn’t as over-the-top fancy as he’d thought it would be. Everything was clearly expensive, but style and elegance had been blended seamlessly with comfort and functionality.

It was, all in all, very Allison. Very Renee, as well-her belongings were scattered still, though she was away with her corps and had been for weeks.

Allison and Matt caught up as Neil set the bag he’d brought with him down on the couch. Allison had already set a stack of movie boxes on the low coffee table, and she and Matt poured over them as Allison clicked orange-painted nails on wood and plastic.

Neil sat, quietly, happily, listening to them debate merits with cheerful competition. Not home yet, maybe, but with some of his family.

…

Neil dreams of fire and destruction.

Not him, not his mother, this time. Burning cars have long since trailed off in his nights, replaced with anger and knives and blood dripping warm.

Neil is standing in front of his building. His old one, the one he’s leaving, the one he spent almost two years living in.

And it is burning.

Smoke stings his eyes, his nose. Sheets of heat warm his skin, flipping little hairs around like wind.

He takes a step back. And another.

It is not enough.

The flames grow, reaching, lighting up the night sky. He can’t see stars, but he can see the faint outline of clouds.

Clouds, or smoke. Neil can’t tell.

Neil runs, then, as fast as he can towards the burning building.

He knows something is in there, something he needs, something he has to save.

He’s been burned before. He can handle this, can’t he? For the sake of the _something_ calling him, demanding he be there?

Bright-hot flames laps at Neil’s fingertips like water. He reaches, and reaches, and-

Wakes to Allison and Matt standing over him.

Neil blinks sleep and smoke from his eyes. He avoids looking at them-he doesn’t want them to see him, he doesn’t want anybody to see him, he wants to _run-_

Neil remembers who is with him when Allison’s manicured hand lands lightly on his shoulder. 

These are his friends, his family. It’s been years, but Neil remembers how Matt would rouse him from nightmare and comfort him with movies and jokes, how for years Allison was the only one he’d trust to cut his hair and the first he’d turn to when he needed anything material.

They don’t try to get him to talk. They coax him into sitting up as they turn on the light, as Matt drapes his blanket around Neil’s shoulders.

He’d fallen asleep on the couch sometime around their third movie. Neil has never been the biggest fan of watching them-too much fake violence and insensible plotlines to fully enjoy-but he loves his family.

And he was exhausted. That hadn’t helped, either.

They don’t unpause the movie. It’s a horror film-Allison is quite fond of them-and the image frozen there shows a blurry shot of a girl being dragged away by her hair, clothes stained the bright red of badly obvious fake blood.

Matt sees him looking and shuts it off. Allison leaves to grab more blankets.

Neither asks about his nightmare. He doesn’t tell them.

He doesn’t have to. To give it that power. He lets it fade into the back of his mind, just another bad memory, and he doesn’t think about it.

He smiles and his family. They’ve turned on music, something loud and bright, and Neil lets them pull him up to shimmy awkwardly as Allison prepares root beer floats from leftovers and places a package of too sweet store-bought cookies on the counter.

Matt falls on them like he’s starving, and it reminds Neil, briefly, of Andrew’s ravenous sweet tooth.

He’s going home tomorrow, but right now he is with family.

It is almost midnight, and Neil is swaying with Matt and Allison in her kitchen while she and Matt debate the best kind of sweets, and Neil is safe and happy and alive.

  
  


_Neil, age 27_

Neil twists the band around his finger as he contemplates the darkening sky, putting thoughts of twisted metal and bent plastic and alarms blaring too loud out of his mind.

It’s new. The ring. Andrew had given it to him at their small courthouse ceremony earlier that week, barely an hour after Neil had been released from the hospital.

His new stab wound, bandaged tightly, throbs in time with his heartbeat. Neil, with the ease of long practice, ignores it.

The balcony railing is still warm from a day of summer sun and heat, and Neil leans against it as he pulls his ring off.

It’s tungsten, Andrew had said. He’d handed it to Neil as they stood in front of a judge in a room filled with almost empty benches. Kevin sat nearby, close enough to see but not hear Andrew’s quiet voice. 

Scratch resistant, too. He would be able to wear it under his gloves during games.

Neil traces the simple engraving on the inside. _NJ &AM _

Neil thinks of all the initials he’s had, and how NJ feels more familiar than all of them. NJM, now.

And he remembers, suddenly and vividly, how his mother’s gold ring warped. It had still been on her finger, ash-covered and bent oddly, when he pulled her from that car. It had fractured and fallen away, brittle from heat and worn from use, as. As.

Neil doesn’t think about that. His mother is long dead and gone, and he doesn’t want to remember her anymore. Her sway over his life is gone, and though he is and always will be grateful, he can’t let her haunt him.

The sky is pitch dark, now, and the moon-almost full-illuminates the irregular outline of storm clouds gathered thickly.

The first drop of rain splashes off Neil’s hand. He stands straight, tilting his head back, and lets the following downpour soak his hair, slip down his cheeks. 

Neil goes in when thunder cracks and lightning flashes brightly. Andrew is waiting for him, sitting on the couch with Sir in his lap. Neil watches him roll a pint of ice cream in his hands, methodically, the way he always does.

The bandages slip. They’re not wet from the rain, Neil wasn’t out there long enough for it, but he’s been wearing the same ones all day and he needs to change them.

He collapses next to Andrew instead.

King is laying with her feet tucked neatly under her on the arm of the couch. She’s soft, and her purr is loud and rumbling when Neil strokes gently down her back.

He tells Andrew his bandages need to be changed. The angle is too awkward for Neil to reach on his own, so Andrew does it for him.

Andrew would insist on doing it even if it wasn’t. He says that he can see it better, and he won’t ignore any signs of something wrong. He says Neil would tell him he’s fine even if he was torn open throat to groin.

Neil endures the teasing, because they both know that’s a lie. He can take care of most medical problem that pop up-thank the years spent stitching up bullet holes for that-and he’s seen firsthand what letting an injury go untreated and uncared for too long will do. He’s not risking his career, and their lives, by ignoring a little stab.

So Neil follows Andrew into their bedroom, and he watches the low light glint of the band on a chain and a finger, and he complies quietly when he’s turned around and poked and prodded and bandaged.

Neil looks down at Andrew’s blonde head as rough-calloused, familiar hands smooth over bandage and scar tissue. 

Neil traces the small fox paw engraved on the outside of his wedding band and thinks, _this_.

  
  


_Neil, age 29_

Neil is watching the people he killed kill the people he loves.

There’s only a few, his mother was the one who defended while he ran. But there are some, and though Neil knows they were his father’s men and had done horrible things, the faces still pop up from time to time.

This is the first time he’s seen those faces in years. He closes his eyes, wishing he didn;t have to now, and pinches his arm.

That trick has never worked for him, though, and Neil still sees blood splattered over limp bodies and dripping knives held in long-dead hands.

Neil pinches his arm again, harder, using his nails instead. It still doesn’t work, and his lungs are filling with iron and pain and bittersharp loss.

He drowns in it, gasping and pleading, vision darkening and knives on his skin, in his mind, tearing and cutting and Nathaniel is rising from ground long burned and dead. 

Neil bursts into consciousness like it’s a fight, fists failing and he’s falling.

Neil hits the floor with a crash and the wind is knocked from him.

He catches his breath, laying on the floor and staring up at the top bunk bed. Andrew, leaning over the side, stares back.

There’s a startled squawk and a thump as Kevin lands next to Neil. He wasn’t sleeping, it’s only ten-thirty, but he was dozing a bit and Neil’s sudden appearance had woken him instantly in a very non-Kevin way.

Kevin gets to his feet, grumbling, and ambles out of the room. Andrew watches him go, then looks back at Neil and rolls his eyes.

Neil can’t fight the little, embarrassing, giggle that spills out. It’s stress and fear gone and the tide come in, it’s Andrew and Neil on vacation with their family, it’s Andrew’s raised eyebrow and Kevin’s indigent muttering and Neil breaks.

He laughs so hard tears come to his eyes, and he doesn’t know if it’s relief or joy that floods him. 

Andrew watches him, and to someone who doesn’t know him like Neil does Andrew looks bored and blank as always. But Neil can read the crease in the corners of his eyes, can see the smile on the edges of his mouth, can tell it in the way he raises his eyebrows or rolls his eyes or sticks his tongue out just the slightest bit at just the right time to make Neil keep laughing.

He’s lost any breath he managed to take, and tears are still leaking from his eyes when Andrew finally climbs down to join him.

Neil grasps Andrew’s extended hand, palm dry and fingers calloused. Andrew pulls him up with enough force to make Neil stumble, then steadies him quickly and with the familiarity inherent in an action repeated again and again.

Neil is twenty-nine and this is his life, now. Andrew’s hands on his waist, chapped lips and rough stubble under his fingers. It is vacation with their family in a too-expensive cabin, it is bunk beds with Kevin and painted nails with Allison and sparring with Renee. It is cats curled warm on his chest and a ring on his finger and the heavy, well-welcomed weight of family and love on his shoulders.

  
  


_Neil, age 30_

Neil hasn’t had a nightmare in nine months, and it should feel like an accomplishment.

Instead, he just feels dread. He knows something is coming, he can feel it, but he doesn’t want to encourage it closer thinking about it.

So he doesn’t. He goes to bed with Andrew, and the cats, and he is home.

Neil always sleeps facing out, with Andrew at his back and Andrew’s arm under his head. 

Tonight is not different. 

They get ready for bed at the same time. Their routine is a thing well fixed into place, and usually Neil takes comfort in it. In that no matter what the day brought, they would have this at the end of it.

But tonight. Tonight Neil has cleavers and lighters and red-taped racquets hanging on his shoulders, and he feels the weight of it dragging him down.

It takes him a long time to sleep. He regrets the fall, regrets not just saying _fuck tomorrow_ and staying awake.

Neil thinks, oddly, of that one phrase as he jolts awake covered in sweat. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and he is blind.

Neil slips carefully out of bed, dislodging Andrew’s arm and then settling the covers back into place. They’ve done this enough, slept in the same bed long enough, that Andrew doesn’t wake, only turning his face further into his pillow.

Neil slips out of the room and down the hall. King is sprawled across the couch-her ears twitch as he passes, but she doesn’t stir otherwise.

Neil pauses to grab a sweater he’d left on the chair. Sir is sleeping on it, and she _mrrows_ grumpily when he tugs it out from under her. He debates with himself for a moment, then takes the matching hat. It’s cold outside, here, and Neil can’t risk getting sick with the season starting soon.

He leaves the door to the balcony open. 

Neil half wishes they hadn’t stopped smoking, if only so he had something to do with his hands. He grips the railing instead, the metal of it cold enough to shock him the rest of the way awake.

The metal of his wedding band clinks against the rail. It’s still warm with his body heat, but he knows it will cool in this weather.

Neil rubs the thumb of his opposite hand over it. Married. He still almost can’t believe it, but Andrew wears the match on a chain around his neck, and has for close to three years now.

Getting stabbed that one time was good for _something_ , Neil guesses. Hospitals are a lot easier to deal with, anyway.

Neil doesn’t know how long he stands there. The stars have moved, but it’s still far from sunrise. He’s just starting to think he should go in when floorboards creak and Andrew steps onto the balcony behind him.

Neil glances back, meets his eyes. Leans into Andrew’s solid frame, and he’s just tall enough to rest his cheek on Andrew’s hair. It’s soft, and it tickles his nose, and his hat slips up just a bit, but Neil loves it. Loves the comfort and the warmth, loves knowing Andrew is here and though he wasn’t always, he will be now.

More time passes before Neil starts thinking about going in. His nose is cold, his exposed cheek near stinging with it.

His fingers, which have since been tucked into the waistband of Andrew’s sweatpants, are not.

Andrew huff out a breath that hangs visibly in the air. He regards it, then Neil, then steps back and away. He keeps his grip on Neil’s sleeve and pulls him in as he walks, slowly, backwards into the bedroom.

Neil stifles a laugh at the sight. Andrew Minyard, walking backwards through their living room. Almost tripping over piles of books and laundry, a cat weaving between his legs.

They stop in the hall in front of their bedroom. Andrew leans back against the wall, pulling Neil so he stumbles and catches Andrew’s shoulders for support. Andrew steadies him, hands on his waist, and pulls him in closer.

This is familiar enough now that Neil can feel the yes hanging in the air as he meets Andrew’s eyes. Andrew’s stubble is scratchy under his palm and he presses their lips together chastely.

He has to step back when he yawns in the middle of it, and Andrew rolls his eyes. 

They don’t speak as they make their way to bed. Andrew is wearing the same hoodie and sweatpants he was all day, minus the armbands, and Neil doesn’t bother taking off his hat when they slip into bed.

Andrew lays as he always does with his back to the room and Neil tucked in close. He wraps one arm around Neil’s waist and slips the other under his neck. Neil’s cheek is tucked into the soft hoodie sleeve bunched at Andrew’s elbow. A soft _thud_ and the sound of purring follow King as she jumps onto the bed and settles down next to Neil. Sir, following behind her, chooses to settle at the end of their bed where their feet don’t reach.

One small head, cradled on an even smaller paw, presses gently on the blanket over Neil’s feet. 

Neil slips his hand under Andrew’s elbow and pets King’s belly. She purrs harder, rolling to press the top of her head to the bed and exposing more of her belly. Neil strokes it a few more times to feel the soft rumble in her chest.

Neil falls asleep easily, and he knows he has someone with him to battle the darkness back where it belongs now.

Neil is thirty, and he is wrapped in his husband’s arms with two cats purring next to them.

He fights his own nightmares, and he has his family at his side to help.

He’s home.

****

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I almost didn't finish this in time, I hit 10000 literally only a couple hours before posting. But I did it!!
> 
> Also, this is my [Tumblr](https://insanemreads.tumblr.com/) if you want to come chat! <3


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